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Finance Watch: VCs Are Sharing The Wealth With More Biopharmas

 
• By Mandy Jackson

Private Company Edition: While venture capital invested in the industry dropped in 2019, the number of deals rose as investors funded more early-stage VC rounds. Money continues flowing to large deals as well, including $105m for ALX Oncology and $98m for CANbridge.

Finance Watch

Venture capital investment in biopharmaceutical firms dropped from a record high of $18.6bn in 2018 to $16.6bn in 2019 – the second-highest amount of VC cash raised by the industry in a single year – but it was the number of companies receiving venture investment that broke a record – 866 in 2019 versus 831 in 2018. What that means is that while venture investors continue to back a lot of $100m-plus mega-rounds, they also put more money into smaller VC rounds for earlier-stage companies.

Digging a little deeper into the Venture Monitor report from Pitchbook and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) released in January, the average biopharma deal size in 2018 was $24.4m and it dropped to $21.2m in 2019

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